Citrix and Skype for Business on Wyse ThinOS

One of the great new features in the release of Skype for Business on Citrix XenDesktop is the ability to use a non-Windows, Wyse ThinOS, endpoint as the client device to support new Skype features. Previously, you were limited to using a Windows endpoint running a full Windows PC or Windows Embedded thin client.

More importantly, your able to leverage the power of the Citrix Real Time Media Engine (RTME) which is embedded in the Wyse ThinOS for audio/video offload. This allows the client to offload rendering from the server VM onto the client leveraging the client CPU/memory to process audio/video. This freeing of VM resources allow greater server/desktop density and better performance as local client resources are also being used.

The key benefit of leveraging the RTME support is you eliminate the traditional VDI hair-pinning of the unified communications audio/video traffic which would route all the audio/video traffic through the virtual machines as illustrated below.